my boyfriend’s rival is fassy/ fassy is my boyfriend’s rival

I am abnormally obsessed with the actor Michael Fassbender (better known to his disciples as “Fassy”). The above is a video tour of the textual sublimation of my peculiarly sexual obsession with Fassy. To narrate the exact provenance of my obsession with Fassy is a bigger textual task. Suffice for now to say that I saw X-Men: First Class in the theatre four times. My fantasy date is for me and my boyfriend to have a double date with Fassy and Zoe Kravitz. And I love that that tiny patch on Fassy’s right upper lip where facial hair does not grow. My boyfriend had patiently borne the hysteria of my obsession with Fassy, and rather than have me bear an illegitimate child of Fassy, suggested that I not only write something about it, but that I turn the text into a holdable object.

We came to call this object a “foldover”: kind of like a turnover: text and art in a flaky buttery shell that can be popped into your brain when you’re walking to work or needing a mid-afternoon sweet fix. The foldover contains two short pieces on Fassy’s presence in the two films (A Dangerous Method and Shame), and an original drawing. It is color printed on vellum, and the covers (whose design is inspired from 90s issues of Interview magazine) have been hand-painted by yours truly. Only 28 have been produced.

The foldovers will be available for purchase at some fine outlets or blackmarket corner in the near future. In the meantime, they will make their public debut tonight at Dirty Looks, a fabulous queer film series directed by Bradford Nordeen (tonight’s event, at Judson Memorial Church in New York, highlights the video work of Charles Atlas). The timing of the debut feels right, as Fassy’s name was not among the Oscar nominations that were announced yesterday.

So in angora soft protest of Fassy’s victimization, my boyfriend Roddy will be representing me and my Fassy foldover at Dirty Looks tonight. My boyfriend is so Lord Warburton from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: he has “a kind thought even for a rival.” So if you are in New York, swing by, catch some great queer video work, maybe buy a foldover, and say hi to the only man in my world who is Fassy’s rival.

california glitter manga (la fille du MTA)

The night I became a real Californian I was in Manhattan (of course). My boyfriend and I were at the 66th St. subway station and a metro card machine had just eaten up ten of my dollars. Because there was no attendant station at this particular entrance, we had to climb out and seek out another that held a human being in an MTA uniform. I asked my strident boyfriend to take care of rectifying this situation, since I can barely get on the phone to order a pizza. He walked up to the glass cage and spoke with cute righteousness right into the little slotted metal oval that separated the MTA attendant from the outside world. After listening to his impassioned complaint and looking at my metro card, she said simply: “There’s nothing I can do.”

This was the dreaded and expected reply. I thought maybe her metro card reader could magically see that I had stuck $10 in it, but apparently not. She could give me a complimentary entrance, but otherwise, the only thing we could do was fill out a complaint form and mail it to the MTA Office and wait for the big fat refund check to be mailed to me. “You have to go get the number of the machine that took your money though,” she instructed. My Brooklyn-dwelling boyfriend has a thing against the MTA anyway, so this was a welcome last straw. He went all fire-and-brimstone on the MTA agent: “Are you serious? I know it’s not your fault, but this is just ridiculous.”

As he ranted more, I just kind of stood off to the side, mutely watching the MTA agent. She was a small, thin-faced African-American woman of middle years. She was bundled in a grey fleece and she looked tired as all hell. Her face was tightly closed against the brief but broad range of consumer’s fury my boyfriend was unfurling on my behalf. But while she met my boyfriend’s gaze dead-on, her look was not unsympathetic. Her hair was pulled back into a tidy bun, with an elegant, almost Victorian middle part. I stepped forward, tugged at my boyfriend’s sleeve like a little wife and said, “It’s OK. Let’s just go get the number of the machine.” I skipped up to the attendant myself to receive the complaint form and self-addressed prepaid envelope. I thanked her and then we were off.

The whole time I dragged him up and out and back into the first subway entrance, my boyfriend was grumbling like mad, but I weirdly felt all daisies and buttercups. I felt something come out from that MTA booth and wind snugly around my feelings. As I explained to my still indignant boyfriend, it was almost midnight, and that lady was probably not thrilled about being trapped in that glass box, her hands tied by the MTA corporation that didn’t give a fig about her, either. I cooed at him and practically danced the both of us to and fro, from the attendant box, to the offending ticket machine, back to the attendant box. My boyfriend said afterwards that I was “bouncing around like My Little Pony.”

The MTA lady was waiting for us. “What’s the number of that machine?” Her inquiry held fatigue, but also an upward lilt: it was not aggressive.

I skipped to the counter. “1733,” I chirped, sounding as if 1733 were a winning lottery number.

The lady nodded and wrote the number down. It could have been her grocery list for all I knew, but I appreciated the official quality of the gesture. She then waved us towards the turnstall. Her voice was, again, not friendly, but not unfriendly, either. “OK. Both of you go through the first entrance.”

“Thank you!!” My voice was so cheery it was almost a shout. I skipped and collided into an unyielding turnstall, but I bounced right off with an unsinkable “Yeep!!”

“The first gate.” The lady called out. Gently, I think.

“Oh, the first one! Thank you!!” I then bounced right through the right gate, harp tunes popping out of my pores. As we were waiting for our train, my boyfriend expressed his amazement at me. He told me that my unusual bounciness had melted away not only his own cynicism and grumpiness, but, he deduced, that of the MTA lady. “I think you shocked her. She didn’t shut down on us, which is the norm. She’s so used to all these grouchy aggressive New Yorkers. You brought a little California glitter to a hardened MTA attendant.”

It is an understatement to describe myself as not the sunniest gal in the room. I learned how to be an adult by reading Sylvia Plath, and deep in my heart, I am still a depressed teenage girl. But that night, I felt like covering that grey metal and Plexiglas box with iridescent fluorescent hologrammatic stickers of hearts, rainbows, and unicorns. I know I’m not powerful enough, but I hope I had turned that MTA lady’s eyes into wide glitter starry manga eyes.

There are some things I could attribute to (or blame for) my uncharacteristically puffy amiyumi behavior: the cheery opera we had just left (Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment with a heroine styled after Lucy Ricardo and Pippi Longstocking); the glasses of champagne inhaled during intermissions; the superfestive glittery Isabel Marant sweater I wore to sit with my boyfriend in plush blood red balcony seats, we the junior opera queens. What all of those factors did was open up the airwaves for the call of the wild, the call of California. Pack me in a pink box and call me Malibu Hello Kitty Barbie.

analog sex in a digital world

One of the things I promised myself when I fell in love this summer was that I was not going to look back. With my boyfriend, I didn’t want to be in love the same way I was in love in my twenties. This task has been surprisingly easy for someone whose idea of living in the present had been romanticizing/ regretting the past and idealizing/ dreading the future. It helps that my boyfriend is the kind of soulful being who would respond to an OK Cupid profile (mine) in which “Thinking about the past and the future” was the answer to the question “What are you mostly likely to be doing on a Friday night?” So yeah, I’m getting better at living fully fleshed in the present tense. What surprised me was how I—and my boyfriend—went back in time to construct a romantic sex life.

A couple weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were verbally horsing around, and because he is that delectable combination of tech geek and music geek (with an MFA in electronic music to prove it) we somehow came up with the idea of my being a cassette tape to his tape deck. Exactly how we came upon this metaphor I don’t quite remember. All I know is we’ve been using it like hell to flirt with one another. A week ago, we had the following email exchange (which has been redacted for love and modesty):

Me: “you make me feel like a cassette tape being slipped out of its case.”

Roddy: “i’m slipping you out of your case so i can sound your ribbon with my magnet this weekend!”

OK, cue burlesque comic horns and please, gag if you want to. It could seem like we were making some kind of crude sex joke about a penis and a receptive orifice, but it sure didn’t feel like it. When I think about the cassette tape and the tape deck as a metaphor of our connective sexuality, I find that it resists cooption by human sexuality. Certainly, something is being inserted into another thing via an opening. But the cassette tape is hardly a phallic object. Not only is it not oblong in shape, the cassette doesn’t have the insistent willfulness of the phallus. The cassette is in fact a very coquettish object (even its name is a cute pink tease): it withholds the smooth brown thin ribbons of its voice within a tiny flat body. So traditionally feminine is the cassette that it must wait for a knob of magnet to push into its own slight opening and press its own magnetic skin down against a fairy bed of foam. But for the cassette tape to be invaded, rotated and read by the hungry knob, it has to first invade the bodily integrity of the knob. In their mutual invasion and caginess, the cassette and tape deck could be lesbianic...except that the two objects are totally different, physically.

This little mental exercise underscored for me how much heterosexuality structures the fantasy life of gay people: cock-dildo-tongue-finger up in the ass or vulva, the culmination of the sexual act is penetration leading to climax. Even when we reject it, penetration hovers above us like the patriarch we are rebelling against. Penetration hovers ever ready to invade all possible fantasy-representations of sex. But rather than creating a sexual metaphor out of the structure of human sexuality, what if we use a metaphor to re-structure human sexuality? What does sound-playback technology teach us about sexually connecting with one another?

The digital means—the mp3 and CD—are depressingly tautological. Operated by light, digital playback forbids touch and tactility and thus offers sexuality that is...well, digital (skype sex). So onto analog: the classic vinyl and turntable combo is, by contrast, depressingly too human. Pointed, mechanized metal probe pierces into the chasms a round object to make it produce sound.

This is why I find the metaphor of the cassette and tape deck to be such a functional conceptual tool for my sex life. It doesn’t shy away from penetration, but it refracts the focus of penetration in such a way that it is impossible to derive from it a phallic narrative. Penetrations cancel each other out, becoming pure choreography. Simultaneously, the mechanics of deriving pleasure emphasizes a gentle, tender tactility: if the magnet pushes down too hard, the tape will be ruined and silenced forever. My boyfriend and I have sex (and romance) like cassette to tape deck.

I always thought I was a girl, but maybe “girl” was just a placeholder in my child’s mind for the moment when I would learn about that glorious object of analog technology called “cassette.” Just hours earlier today, I went to the basement and pulled out a giant box full of my old cassette tapes. I was bummed that I couldn’t find my Mariah Carey “Emotions” cassette single, but I did find a bushel of old mix tapes, including one decorated with clippings from a 1992 issue of Vibe magazine: a tiny picture of Mariah and a caption that quotes Biggie’s “Dreams” (“Mariah Carey’s kinda scary.”) I had forgotten, but I also had multiple mix tapes that I had labeled, “My Girl Self.” This was back in the nineties, when I was looking desperately for love and having bad sex with bad men. In wanting a cassette to stand in for My Girl Self, wasn’t I really yearning for this inevitable moment in November 2011 when I would find myself fully upgraded in the technology of love and sex?

friendship in the time of consumerism

What you are about to read began as a love letter. Perhaps it is still a love letter of sorts—it’s definitely an ode, to someone who is all at once fleeting and everlasting. Her name is Whitney. I’ve known her for a couple years now, but I don’t even know her last name. She is a salesperson in the handbag department of the Barneys in San Francisco. I’ve always thought of her as “my” salesgirl but perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am “her” buyinggirl.

I first thought about writing something about Whitney while I was preparing to come back to the East Coast from my usual summer in San Francisco. As I was packing my summer loot, I was suddenly struck with the thought that over the last few years, the friends I’ve had in the Bay Area have kind of faded into a distance that feels sadly like the past (This is mostly my fault—self-enclosed solitude is an easy instinct for me). Aside from my dearest sister, I was really not going to miss anyone in San Francisco. Except Whitney. But if this strikes any of you as a pathetic admission (“You think your salesgirl is your friend?”), I don’t care. It is true that Whitney is not my friend. But Whitney and I do have an intimacy.

Whitney is a young woman, probably in her mid twenties. She is tall, and in the teetering stiletto pumps she favors, she’s even taller. Chicly, her limbs are about the width of a toothpick. All of this, combined with the fact that she has a cute, doll-like face, makes her a shoo-in for America’s Next Top Model. Her long black hair is usually middle-parted and styled in soft waves that make you think ever so slightly of Farrah Fawcett, but pulls you back right at the moment of full-on 70s retro nostalgia. Of course she is always dressed perfectly, a femininity that seems simultaneously strict and floral. Maybe it’s the fact that she wears glasses (black Ray-bans) and resin earrings in the shape of roses in bloom. Her voice makes me think of raspberry peppermints.

Last summer, Whitney sold me my first Proenza Schouler PS1 bag. In the couple weeks leading up to my finally settling on (of course) plain black leather, Whitney welcomed my obsessive stalking of the bag with salesperson perfection: she encouraged me to test the tactility of various models (urban environment is rough in suede), try swinging various sizes off my shoulders, offered handbag camaraderie as a customer (she herself ownd the Givenchy Nightingale and we bonded about the inability of boyfriends to understand the primacy of expensive handbags). Whitney guided me through my investment with the strategic focus of a general and the soft leniency of a psychotherapist. And unlike a lot of snooty bitch salesgirls old and young who regularly ignore me in high-end shops, Whitney indulged me sweetly week and after non-purchasing week, even though I was wearing a cracked-out Danzig t-shirt and raggedy rolled up jeans.

And out of that came a familiarity that became, this summer, a kind of intimacy. A week before leaving San Francisco, I dropped by to check out the pre-Fall wares, and while we were doing our usual loose small talk, she impulsively (it felt like impulsiveness to me) revealed: “I got engaged this summer!” We hugged and hopped up and down. I felt so happy for her I felt emotions gushing out of every pore. We grabbed each other’s forearms while she told me all the details of how her man proposed to her, when and where the wedding will be, showing me her ring. We were acting like old girlfriends, and so lost in our moment that Whitney almost lost sight of the unhappy-looking old woman waiting to be shown a bag. “See you at Christmastime!” she chimed in that inimitable raspberry peppermint voice as we parted for the summer.

But what is this intimacy between a buyinggirl and a salesgirl? Our relationship is predicated upon the capitalistic system of purchase and exchange. She is the employee of a corporation of consumption and I am a consumer who keeps that corporation going. It could be argued that her friendliness to me is fake, a performance necessary for her job and function. But if she began her friendly overtures to me as the performance of “salesgirl,” is it necessarily so that that friendliness remain “fake”?

Obviously, I don’t believe so. A couple weeks ago, I actually had a discussion about this subject of performing friendliness with my boyfriend (My boyfriend refers to it as an “argument”). We were talking about urban affects, specifically the difference between New York and San Francisco affects. Being a boy who escaped from the South, my boyfriend prefers the bluntly abrasive affect of New Yorkers to the gliding-the-surface niceness of Californians: he found the post-hippie affect of San Francisco to be “fake,” on par with fakey Southern so-called charm, whereas New York aggression may not be nice, but it is always the truth. But my argument (OK Roddy it was an argument) was: performance is always performative. That is, you begin acting a certain way, knowing that the act is a fiction necessary for a certain kind of survival, but do it long enough and you find that you have become the fiction. You have turned yourself into the embodiment of the fiction, you have turned the script into an emotion. You have crafted fact out of fiction.

I believe that the affect of aggressive bluntness is a performance, too. If you are mean or abrasive to strangers, you are communicating a desire for, and in fact, effecting, a basic foreclosure of any desire for future friendship. (No matter how probable or fantastical that future may be.) On the other hand, You may begin “acting” friendly as an act, perhaps because your job requires you to, but if you are any kind of human at all, you do it long enough and you find that the friendliness becomes you because the feeling has actually produced real happiness, detached from the original context of the performance.

This is the way I think about the intimacy between Whitney and me. Behaviors that produce contact points between humans have a tactility. I just prefer that it be soft. Whitney and I bonded over an outrageously expensive handbag. Our intimacy was negotiated and produced over the barrier of a brass-edged glass counter with a discreetly hidden cash register of which we were always acutely and silently aware. So the original form of our “friendship” was, quite simply, hierarchical: salesperson and customer. But with her consistent California salesgirl affect, Whitney pulled me down from the perches of customer and made me instead a baggirl—like her. Her wedding is set for next summer, and of course I do not expect an invitation. But I don’t need one; I’m giddy enough envisioning her as the radiant young bride I know she will be. Even if we never see each other again, Whitney will always be my friend, my California.

salt

Last year, I wrote about the experience of running a half-marathon as a profoundly feminizing experience. So now that I have run my first (and sweet Jesus, possibly last) FULL marathon, what kind of a feminine being have I ended up? Am I now twice the girl I was since I’ve run 26.2 miles in 3 hours and 55 minutes?

In the three weeks since I’d run the San Francisco Marathon, I’ve tried to think through what the experience has meant to my self-sense of femininity. But because the overriding sensory perception of the experience was pain, all I could think of was...childbirth. The four tenets of this metaphor:

ONE: Near the end, with about a mile to go, having already run 25 miles, I felt ready to give up and die. But there was a thing inside me that said KEEP PUSHING.

TWO: After the race, my nipples were completely engorged with blood. Dark blood curdled under the thin skin of their tips.

THREE: Also, my skin had become a dangerous shade of grey.

FOUR: I know I’ve accomplished this kind of amazing thing with my body, but at the same time, I feel utterly defeated by my body. I made my body undergo the most strenuous thing I’ve ever attempted, and yet I feel that somehow, my body is completely beyond the control of my mind.

Of course, this metaphor is not only inadequate, but totally ridiculous. Holding for nine months a fetus that nourishes itself into a baby by sucking up your energy and flesh from within, then spending hours (days?) forcing the bugger to come out of an impossibly stretched vagina or a slice in your belly...that is clearly not even close to moving your legs and breathing hard for 26 miles over a few hours’ time. Yet the narratives can overlay one another because the tenets are evocative of one another. This is why metaphors suck, and I am really beginning to hate them. Because running the marathon DID make me feel more feminine, yet to say I felt feminine because the physicality of it, the utter defeat I feel at the hands of my own body, seems not only regressive but incorrect.

I am constantly trying to stretch the boundaries of my body by trying to get beyond a dependency on metaphors. All I can do is dive into the materiality of my physical experience: the feelings that give it its curves and stance.

I kind of wish my chafed nipples had burst open and their blood seeped through my t-shirt.

My mouth, drained of blood and caked with dead skin, reminded me of white lipstick like 1960s Priscilla Presley.

Those same lips was kissed by my gentle boyfriend. He met me at the finish line and licked my grey arm. He tasted salt left over from the evaporated sweat and said he liked it.

(the) help is on the way (apologies to Melissa Manchester)

I just saw the film The Help. It is not complex. It can be summed up in one sentence: Is it really possible that a human being (or a whole group of human beings) can watch a group of human beings with brown skin go see Cleopatra through a back entrance marked COLORED and then take another few months to discover that she lives among racist people?

hard white resistance

I have tiny red scissors, Japanese, made of stainless steel, red plastic handles that fit around my fingers like rings just one size too big. With their mean little points, they are for prying off bruise-blackened toenails or trimming long bangs. I was doing the latter last week when I sliced through the pad of my left middle finger. I cut myself quite often when trimming my hair because I cut my bangs vertically rather than laterally in order to create ragged ends. The blood flowed out crazily and for a moment I felt that old adolescent electric shock of my body coming together.

In Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, the husband tells his wife that he no longer enjoys sex with her because he is sick of fighting the “hard white resistance” emanating from her body. This hard white resistance, this feminine barrier, is how I’ve always experienced the rhythmic bloodpour of self-mutilation. I used to cut myself because I wanted to escape the tyranny of the visual. I hated seeing myself: mirrors. The pour of blood from blade is coming out of the girl in my head, from the prison of my imagination and taking glossy form in the oxygenated external world. But sometimes my gender dysphoria gets so swollen that I can’t stand it, and even the blood pouring doesn’t help. My body just starts spreading out evil and slow out like Exxon at sea. In my head, I am such a contained, specifically female thing—to confess, Angelina Jolie most of the time. I get up in the morning, put myself together to make my body simulate that specific female thing and I just shatter.

Now, I feel like the little outfits I put on are totally inadequate for containing the goo spilling around in myself. I hate skinny little jeans. I hate 70s hippie bellbottom jeans. I hate 50s rolled up jeans. I’m sick of seeing myself. I want to FEEL myself instead. More and more I want to be naked all the time, naked except for maybe the heavy metal bracelet I bought in Providence in May (the girl who sold it to me for $5 couldn’t take the price sticker off so inside the bangle it still has the sticker—except she added a zero to make it, as she says, “seem more expensive”). I want to be naked without mirrors, I just want to be naked in bed all the time, being caressed into Angie by the hands of a boy rather than the crackling zipper of jeans.

The last time this happened was last summer. Let’s call the boy Drew (not his real name): he fucked me into the girl in my head not because he fucked me like a man but because he fucked me like a lesbian. We would fall into bed kissing and he would put his strong arms around me (arms that were harder and bigger than his chest—the common mistake of boys who work out and not pay attention to body proportion work) and pressing down on me like a pin to specimen, he would fuck me not with his cock or even a finger or two but with his kiss. I’m not coyly describing analingus. We were naked, he was on top of me, but his hard cock was simply pressed into my tummy. Flattening me with his weight and muting me with his lips and tongue, he would just masturbate me while kissing me roughly and creatively, making me realize that kissing has like a hundred different positions. He was manipulating my sex organ by making me forget about it, so hard was the kiss and the body that was breaking mine in its embrace.

We stopped dating after a few dates. On one of those last few dates, we went to see the Angelina Jolie movie Salt. I was enthralled (as usual) by the sight of Angie kicking ass: no actress wears a dykey black pantsuit with crisp white shirt as well as Angie. Drew was not so thrilled. He kept cracking jokes about her big lips throughout the film, which irritated me. As we were leaving the movie, I went on about how much I loved it.

“You love these movies where chicks kick ass, don’t you?” he asked me.

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“Not really. Maybe if it was a really good-looking guy doing the ass-kicking I would like it.”

We went back to his place where he fucked me like a lesbian. He fucked like a lesbian but he certainly didn’t think like one. I don’t talk to him any more, and while I do miss fucking him sometimes, I don’t mind not talking to him anymore at all.